Digital halftoning is a technique for displaying a picture on a two-dimensional medium, in which small dots and a limited number of colors are used. The picture appears to consist of many colors when viewed from a proper distance. For example, a picture consisting of black and white dots can appear to display various gray levels.
Typically, an initial seed pattern is provided to generate a halftone mask, with several conventional methods currently being used. For example, a known method is to find a pattern based on blue noise. However, the blue noise method has limitations in that a stochastic blue noise pattern generated by prior art algorithms may not produce uniformly distributed patterns. Similarly, the other known seed pattern generation methods have limitations.
Accordingly, an improved method for generating a seed pattern is desired.